Stereo Tool

All of a sudden , FLAC files that are ok (play fine on VLC and Media player) don't play in Winamp unless ST is disabled (Bypass).


The file starts to play then cuts out. The wave graph show output, but there is none.

Happened on 4.10 and I loaded up 4.22 , same thing.

Anyone else have this issue?

No problems here .. latest Winamp v5.56 STv4.22 .. just all flac files plays fine.

Try with WaveOut Output .. i just tryed DirectSound output in winamp and it's not working. hmm

Dang, I just tried WaveOut and had the same problem with plain old streaming audio.

Something aint right. Sound starts and cuts out after a second. Wave display in and out on ST keeps on fine, just no audio.

Surprised there isn't more reporting of this.

Using Win 7 x64 here.

Did it work properly in the past? The fact that the output waveform is displayed _should_ mean that the data is sent back to Winamp, so it might have something to do with the CPU load. Can you check your CPU load when Stereo Tool is running?

And, do you have a multi-core system? Multicore support is one of the changes in version 4.00+

I never had this problem until recently.

I run a quad core, so CPU load is definitely NOT an issue. Never over 20% usage.


I watched the direct sound status page when toggling BYPASS on ST. It continues to run as if nothings wrong, except there is ZERO output unless I have ST off.

Only FLAC affected as far as I can tell. Any ideas?

This was annoying me and being a certified hater of anything not working right, I applied some of my debugging skills to this issue.

Turns out it was the setting of the 'Clear buffer if no data arrives' . It was set to the minimum .05. This was causing the FLAC problem but in nothing else.

I ticked it up to .30 and all seems well.

Hope I saved you some time trying to find the problem.

LOL! I would have never found that without setting that setting to .05 myself So thanks!

I guess the chunks in FLAC files are bigger than in MP3s. And so the time between two FLAC chunks might be bigger than 0.05 ms.

To make sure this doesn't happen again, I'll change the code such that it takes the time a chunk takes to be played into account - that way any input will be handled identically.

Was just browsing around and I see another thread where someone had a very similar problem caused by the same setting.

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=580

Were you going to set the minimun to 1.5 seconds?

I'm not even sure how mine got set to .05 or if that was the default.

The default should be 1.5 s. And before, 0.5 s or so was the minimum value - some people however wanted to set it lower because they had set the Winamp buffer size to 0.1 second or so.

But, you didn't set it to 0.05 yourself? That's odd... It shouldn't jump to 0.05 automatically (just as it shouldn't have jumped to 0 in the post you referred to, but I've fixed that).

I can't tell you WHY but that setting keeps randomly dropping back to .05. No other setting is doing that that I've noticed.